Einstein Visiting Fellowship Bertil Tungodden: Fairness, freedom, and inequality acceptance -- A new approach to the study of distributional preferences.

In the second funding period the project will deepen the previous research studies on combining expertise in different approaches to study the heterogeneity of different fairness standards as well as other deviations from the standard model and disentangling their impacts.

Additionally, the project’s work plan will also include a new line of research on fairness and freedom of choice. This new line of research focuses on a key challenge in most Western societies - how to combine the fundamental principles of freedom of choice and fairness in the design and implementation of societal institutions (Sen, 2002). The project will focus on studying how people handle tensions between these two principles, under different conditions. This will inform the optimal policy regarding the allocations of commodities/assets as well as opportunities/capacities: the will of people is likely to shape the societal responses to the fundamental trade-off between fairness and freedom of choice, through voting and non-voting mechanisms.